Grit Lab Report

Hi Jai,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 2: I have 2 or 3 emerging interests but am unsure how to figure out which one to pursue .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were NA, NA, and NA.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were kinesthetic, social, and musical.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to passing my classes .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said have time for myself .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said relaxation .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said all this work😒 .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: when i finish an assignment i’ll have a sweet treat 😋 .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in sports .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt failure when receiving critical feedback, and failure when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school lol .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .

In one word, you said it made you feel proud .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Grit doesn't equal talent. I played sports for many years and I was always told those who have more heart and effort will get you further in life than just pure talent.
"obsessive interest" there are so many things im not good at but i regret not pursuing those things because the obsession was there
your talents are what comes easily to you
goal hierarchy helps the lower/tedious level goals feel like they have more of a purpose
Crossing the rubicon means fully committing to a goal
Deliberate practices exceeds skill whereas flow state meets skill
the distinction between advice and feedback. one is more about the future and the other is about the past. i never thought about the difference and now i am enlightened.
Ever Fail, Fail better
change your physical situation
Self transcendence is a beyond the self purpose

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Maeve Gonter
Jai I am so glad I’ve gotten to be your teammate during all of Grit Lab! I’ve admired the way you clearly think before you speak and the intentionality between all you’ve share in class. I’ve so appreciated learning about your relationship with your family. Seeing how you light up when you talk about your parents, or your siblings is so sweet and truly has been heartwarming to watch. I’ve admired your dedication to pursuing both sports management by joining the basketball team as a manager and producing music. I was genuinely so impressed by your discovery project presentation. First of all, I will say it was more interesting than an DJ presentation but let me say things of actual substance. I was floored when you pulled up the songs that had been sampled. The fact you’d been able to recognize the beats and connect them shows the breadth of your music knowledge and how diverse your taste is. Your line that taking something old to create something even better sticks with me. Giving new life and rhythm to music is probably the best reduce, reuse, recycle I’ve heard of in a really long time.
Jackson Lopiano
Jai has been a terrific teammate over the course of this semester. She is a very insightful listener and contributor to group discussions. She was always open to sharing personal experiences with our team depending on the week’s topic, which has truly enhanced my learning experience in this class. From sitting together in the back corner of the Grit Lab classroom to the back corner of the Discovery Project presentation room, I have thoroughly enjoyed the time I’ve spent with her. I appreciate how Jai is really passionate about both her family and personal endeavors, and I know that she will go on to do great things no matter what she pursues. I enjoyed listening to both what Jai said and created with music during her Discovery Project. One thing about Jai’s Discovery Porject that I appreciate is that even though she was going back and forth between multiple things for her project, she choose easy, meaning that she picked something related to what she knew she enjoyed and happened to be related to her Plan C (i.e. something music related). Another thing I appreciated about her presentation was that she related her presentation back to conversations she would have with her dad related to music sampling. My main learning from Jai’s Discovery Project presentation is that for me, when I am moving forward to find something that I like, I should not focus on trying to conquer something that I know I struggled with in the past but instead pursue something that comes naturally to me/that I already enjoy.
Ambika Gaur
Jai brought a very steady and comforting presence to the group. Jai listened deeply and without judgement. Seeing her open up from being quieter at the beginning of the semester, to lighting up when speaking about her family (with whom she is clearly very close to and loves very much), was so special and fun to see. Jai inspired me a lot this semester, because it is clear that she is fiercely passionate and driven about the things she does, and she has a sense of clarity both about herself as a person, and her goals in a broad sense. I remember asking her about how she became interested in sports psychology as a career one class, and it was clear that this was something very exciting and important to her. It was also really heartwarming to see how much her family holds a special place in her life, and to hear about their influences in the things she does. Jai is clearly a very loyal friend who deeply cares for and supports those that are important to her. It has been an absolute pleasure and a lot of fun getting to know Jai this semester; she made my Grit Lab experience more meaningful. From her Discovery Project, I really appreciated how Jai took the time to show us some of the things she had done by letting us hear some of her playlists that she had made. Sampling was not something I was super familiar with before learning about it from her, and it was clear that making the playlists was something that was very time-consuming and required a lot of knowledge and dedication. It was also clear that Jai had a lot of fun doing her Discovery Project, and the time she spent was fun for her. I also really appreciated how Jai mentioned her Discovery Project relating to her Career C and how it was building on what she had learned from a class she took on music production.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.